


Seasons

by Trabi



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, F/M, Fluff, Future Fic, Gardens & Gardening, Married Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-22
Updated: 2019-12-22
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:27:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21906727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trabi/pseuds/Trabi
Summary: A garden and other new beginnings.[and unapologetic fluff]
Relationships: Illya Kuryakin/Gaby Teller
Comments: 10
Kudos: 72
Collections: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Winter Holiday Gift Exchange 2019





	Seasons

**Author's Note:**

  * For [diadema](https://archiveofourown.org/users/diadema/gifts).



> Request by Diadema: "Illya and Gaby build a nursery... of the baby plant variety (though Solo doesn't need to know that). Whether or not they are also building one (or planning to build one) of the baby super agent variety is up to you!"
> 
> This fic is loosely inspired by ['1973'](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5847049) by Bacardivodka, which was one of the first fics I read for this fandom and is still in my top favorites, especially for future fics. I very briefly mention some aspects of that fic in this story, but it will still make sense even if you haven't read 1973 (although I encourage you to do so!).

Illya felt the draft before he saw the ajar door leading out to the back garden. 

He made his way through the kitchen, the freshly resurfaced cabinets still smelling of varnish. Perhaps the door was left open to air out the remaining fumes. Illya was about to pull it closed when he saw movement in the dusk darkened garden. He pushed the door open to reveal Gaby standing out back, draped in his wool coat and looking upward toward the grey February sky.

The garden was a wreck of sticking mud and haphazard piles of rubbish torn from the house over the previous months, waiting for a long delayed and unspecified journey to the city dump. A far cry from the newly plastered and painted interior that had eaten up every spare moment of their time outside of work since purchasing the property. But it finally felt like home; and for someone who hadn't had a home since he was a child under ten, that meant the world to him.

Even if the garden still needed a bit of upkeep.

"It's snowing," Gaby said, eyes still fixed to the sky, watching the odd snowflake drift down from the grey ether. Illya watched one float to the ground and melt immediately on the cold but wet mud.

"English snow," he said. "It won't stick."

Gaby abandoned the sky and looked toward her booted feet, planted firmly in the mud. She glanced around, the magic of the sporadic snow doing little to conceal the fact that their back garden had an old toilet plopped unceremoniously in the middle of it.

"We need to do something about this garden," she sighed. Illya carefully made his way over to his wife, taking care not to catch his feet on any spare electrical cording or plaster shards. Draped in his greatcoat, she looked especially small, and now overwhelmed at the task at hand. "It's hard to believe anything would ever grow here."

"It will take some work," Illya agreed. "And time. But spring will be here soon."

Gaby looked unconvinced.

"It will be ready in time," Illya promised.  
___

Sporadic English snow gave way to weeks of rain and a subtle balmy warmth that hinted at the arrival of spring. Gaby's sudden fervor for gardening erupted like the green sprouts from the flower bulbs she would eventually purchase. 

The first task, however, was far from flowery, and she knew just the man to assist her.

"Put your back into it," Gaby teased, as Napoleon struggled with the garden toilet. 

"What's the point of living with a six foot five monster if he can't bulldoze your garden?" Napoleon huffed as he got a handle on the toilet. 

"His injured leg is turning out to be very convenient at the moment," she said as Solo hobbled by to take the toilet through to the house to the skip out front. "Don't get mud in my house!" she called after him.

Napoleon didn't know why his colleagues were bothering with the garden. "You should either have an apartment with no outdoor responsibilities, or a yard that goes on forever that you can mow...or play catch in."

"Catch?"

"I don't know what boring suburbonites do, Gabs. But this isn't a yard. It's a fenced-in square of weeds."

Gaby frowned. She had only ever lived in flats, with the odd balcony that was used for drying laundry, smoking and spying on the neighbors. She recalled vague memories of long manicured lawns and paths arched over by roses, yellow, white and pink. She couldn't say where that place had been though.

"Why the sudden urgency?" Napoleon asked once the debris from the garden had been cleared. 

"I just want it finished. So we can use it," Gaby replied.

"For catch?"

Gaby shrugged.  
___

Illya liked Gaby in her professional outfits; her neat tailored skirts and blouses that came up to her neck with a bow. He liked the outfits she had worn for field work; short couture summer dresses, evening gowns dripping in crystals, the odd tactical accouterments. Her pajamas, modest and utilitarian - but never not beguiling - were a close runner up. But Illya liked Gaby best like this; in coveralls like those she had worn the night they had met in East Berlin.

Normally her oil stained loose boiler suit, cinched at the waist with one of his old leather belts, was reserved for when she was working on her beloved Jaguar XKE - a 'gift' she had given herself with the money she inherited from her late estranged father; "It's the least he could do," she had said dryly at the time - but now she donned them to plant Dutch hyacinth bulbs into the freshly tilled soil of the back garden.

Illya leaned against the back door frame and watched as Gaby packed black dirt around the green sprout of the bulb. She looked up, a smear of dirt on her cheek and smiled at his fond expression.

"Need any help?" he asked.

Gaby reached for a spare pair of gardening gloves and tossed them in his direction. 

"Only a few left. I think you can manage."

Illya took the gloves and knelt gingerly onto a tarp in front of the flowerbed, dutifully planting the remainder of the bulbs that Gaby handed him. He then watched Gaby in interest as she watered each in the line.

"Enjoying the view?" she asked coyly.

"I like this," he said, looking her up from head to muddy toe.

"These?" Gaby said laughing, looking down at her muck-stained coveralls. 

Illya hummed sincerely.

"Good," she said, kneeling down to hand him the last of the round little bulbs. "Soon they will probably be the only thing I can wear."  
___

Illya spread grass seed where the rubbish once laid and in a few days green shoots appeared to greet the spring sun. It reminded Gaby of Berlin's parks just after the war; where mortar shells and people desperate for fuel had cleared away the largest of the trees, allowing new growth to spring up where the canopies once blocked the sunlight from above. Saplings emerged beside the charred trunks of felled behemoths, promising a return of peace and greenery.

The only sapling in Gaby's garden was a Japanese maple that Waverley had gifted them. Gaby had always admired the charming, if bizarre, miniature version on display in his office. "It is supposed to bring serenity," Waverley had explained. "Not that I have gotten much of that in this office. All the same..."

Illya took an immediate liking to the little tree, planting it with care in the back corner of their small garden. 

"Hopefully it grows larger than Waverley's bonsai," Gaby said with a bit of doubt. 

"Of course it will," Illya said, "I will make certain of it."

"And how's that?"

"With bonsai you speak to the tree to keep it small," he teased, "with this tree I will do opposite."

Gaby bit her cheek to prevent her smirk. "Let me guess; bonsai is a great Russian art form, incorrectly attributed to the Japanese?"

"Yes. Russians are the best horticulturalists, everyone knows this." 

Gaby tried and failed to keep a smile from forming. "Not too big now," Gaby said in mock sincerity, "I don't want those roots damaging the foundation."  
___

"Did you have a garden, growing up?" Gaby asked one evening, just before falling asleep. 

"We lived in apartments in Moscow," Illya said beside her, confirming her suspicions. "But in the summer, we would go to my family's dacha. There were not gardens exactly, but fields and a forest. Wild flowers."

She was quiet for a long moment, imagining golden fields with blue cornflowers, a little tow-headed boy in their midst. 

"I think we used to go somewhere like that, in the countryside," Gaby said. "I remember there being roses. Lots of roses."

Gaby's eye slipped closed, her head against Illya's shoulder. "I want them to have a garden," she murmured, her mind filled with swaying grass, climbing vines and bright red maple.  
___

Summer in England was temperamental, Gaby had found over the years. Coming and going in short bursts of sunlight and warmth, only to disappear beneath clouds and sprinkling rain moments later.

The grass was nearly as fickle as the sunlight, ranging from a thick carpet of green to lunar surface bare. Illya spread grass seed to the barren spots with little success as he and Gaby were now both too slow to chase the pigeons visiting for lunch from the local park.

Illya looked out the kitchen window to see Gaby lying in one of the thicker patches of grass. His heart jumped in his chest and he ran out the back door as quickly as he could manage.

"Are you okay?" he asked in alarm.

Gaby glanced up from the ground. "Yes, sorry," she said lying her head back down and closing her eyes. "I figure the pigeons won't come back if I'm here and the sun feels so nice. Maybe it will stay out for five more minutes."

The sun did feel nice, so Illya went to lie down beside her on her patch of grass. He could feel and almost see the sun behind his closed lids.

"Did you think it was my time?" she asked. 

"I did not know what to think," he replied. "It's too early. He needs to get bigger."

"Does _he_?" Gaby scoffed.

Illya rolled over to his side and lowered his head to just beside Gaby's rounded middle. "Let me speak some encouragement, like the tree."

Gaby laughed as Illya whispered inspirational nonsense against her belly, imploring its occupant to grow. "Remember," She warned with another laugh. "Not too big!"  
___

The weeds popped up just as Gaby got too round to bend over, but her voice still worked which meant she could still order others around, so she didn't mind in the slightest. 

"You missed one," she told Napoleon, pointing at a dandelion beside his foot. "Remember to get the root."

"You know," Napoleon sighed, pulling at the plant, "all this could be avoided with some AstroTurf."

"We're not getting fake grass."

"The kid's not going to know any better," Napoleon replied, moving on to the next weed.

"Yes they will," Gaby tutted. "They'll remember that their parents had a fake garden with fake grass." Napoleon laughed at her stubbornness and she felt slightly annoyed. "I never had a garden growing up. And neither did Illya. I want this one to have a garden."

Napoleon sobered and nodded, even if he couldn't fully understand the sentiment. 

"Without weeds," Gaby went on. "So hop to it."  
___

As the garden approached the culmination of its first season it went into sudden disuse. Priorities had shifted for a time, weeds and pigeons forgotten. 

One day, an American stopped by - despite his distaste for dirt under the fingernails - to pull the last of the dandelions and water the hyacinths. The leaves on the maple began to redden, unnoticed for the moment.  
___

"You have a gift," Illya said.

Gaby sighed, overwhelmed. "Not another outfit? She'll outgrow everything that's been given to us before she even has a chance to wear it."

"No, it is a gift for you."

"Really?" Gaby asked, intrigued. She felt, throughout the end of this process, she had somewhat been forgotten, even by herself. "What is it?"

Illya led her to the back garden, taking the baby from her so she could put on her coat against the autumn chill. Gaby stepped out into the garden for the first time in weeks, admiring its new autumnal colors. Toward the back, by the fence and beside the Japanese maple with its bright red leaves, was a new addition, small and thorny and waiting to be planted.

Gaby inspected the plant while Illya bundled up their daughter. 

"Roses?" she asked.

"Yes," Illya confirmed. "It may take some time for it to grow and bloom. But we will be here when it does."

Gaby smiled at the thought of their daughter growing up with roses and knowing exactly where they could be found; home, in their rainy little garden with the red maple and the occasional weed and the spotty grass. 

"Thank you," Gaby said, turning back to her family and looking forward to the seasons yet to come.


End file.
